Graham Smith - Jank (Page 8)

07 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The Lie-In

Links worth reading

Good morning, videogames. I am hosting a sleepover for three ten-year-olds and so there will be no lie-in for me today. As I write this now, on Saturday, it's not yet even clear whether there will be sleep for me. That doesn't mean we can't heroically gather some fine writing about videogames (and much more), though.

For PC Gamer, Rick Lane tells the story of the making of Unreal 2. I remember that it was initially enormously ambitious, but I did not know (or did not remember) that it effectively wanted to be Mass Effect.

Verdu wanted to create an all-new Unreal experience, one that leant harder into the cinematic sci-fi of the original. "I hatched a vision for a game that, rather than you just being constrained to one world, it would have this story device that allowed you to move between worlds, and that became a spaceship," he explains. "We were going to create a little simulation of a world on a ship, and it would have these characters that move around, that you have these interesting conversations with, and those characters were going to develop along with the story,

05 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

Tell us what you're playing below

We have once again dragged our nets along the sea floor of videogames to trawl for new releases worth bringing back to port, but for once our catch is bordering on paltry. Perhaps the videogames were simply too small to be caught in our nets, or perhaps the industry's videogame farmers thought it unwise to release alongside the marketing bonanza of Summer Game Fest, which continues over the weekend.

In any case, there are still some interesting new games you could play. Tell us what you are playing in the comments.

Characters, that look like the guys from Peak, drive trucks around a warehouse covered in paint or slime. — Now you know what was at the top of that mountain.

Crashout Crew

The latest game from Aggro Crab, fresh from their success as the co-developers of Peak. Crashout Crew has a similar art style and focus on co-op slapstick, but here your and your buddies are fulfilling orders in a warehouse that's really just an escalating series of physics arenas. A little bit Peak, a little bit Overcooked.

A group of ghostly figures in fancy old fashioned clothes sit around a drawing room. — Guests 1-6.

The 7th Guest Remake

I never played The 7th Guest, but it was practically a permanent fixture for about a decade of PC gaming magazines. This remake uses volumetric filming techniques to produce

02 Jun 2026 By Graham Smith Bits

The adventures of hat guy and tutorial gal

The Adventures Of Elliot: The Millennium Tales seems initially bland, but its demo won me over

Some people's names can hold up to being put in the title of a videogame or movie, but I'm not sure "Elliot" is one of them. The protagonist of Square Enix's next HD-2D game is introduced by one NPC as a man of good character, although they "will admit he has his quirks." I assume that's a reference to Elliot's red hat, which seems to be the the only notable part of his personality.

The Adventures Of Elliot: The Millennium Tales might be as bland as its main character, but I think I'm fully onboard anyway after playing its demo.

Elliot is an adventurer in a fantasy world overrun by beastmen. The remaining human population are safe inside a medieval city's walls thanks to a magical shield maintained by the princess. Adventurers are those few who travel beyond the walls to explore and find supplies, and in Elliot's case to earn money he can use to care for the children in the orphanage in which he was raised. His name could have been called Hero McDogooder and the game name would have been better.

This has the same art style

31 May 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The Lie-In

Links to good words about videogames

Good morning, videogames. I have spent much of my spare time this week spring cleaning, and I'm not done yet. Before we begin another day of scrubbing, lets stay in bed a little longer and enjoy some fine words about games.

For Teen Vogue, Nicole Carpenter asked, why are thin bodies the default in games? It's for the expected reasons, but Carpenter speaks to actors, animators and motion capture experts to explain the challenges and all the ways it's wholly achievable.

Problems arise when there's a big difference in the skeleton of an actor and the body they're being tied to. Drop a short actor's skeleton into a tall character's body and you've got a "spatial problem," Counsell says. "A four-foot tall character takes five steps forward, they've traveled a few meters," he says. "A ten-foot tall character takes four steps forward, they've traveled tens of meters." A short character with an unnaturally long stride, or a tall character with tiny, fast steps, is just not going to look right.

I have yet to start 007: First Light, which means I am yet to read any reviews of

29 May 2026 By Graham Smith What We're Playing

What you could play this weekend

If you had infinite time and money, obviously

It's one of those weeks where several long-anticipated videogames all release at the same time, and yet still that's just the tip of the iceberg of the interesting games that released this week. Me? I'll probably just be playing that great game that's about to be removed from sale.

You? Tell us what you are playing in the comments.

A red map pin, but dropped for real in a grassy field. — An educational game urging players to think carefully about the impact of dropping map pins upon local communities.

Map Map: A Game About Maps

I love maps, and videogame maps, and I have a lot of fondness for the stripped-back sexy-as-it-sounds orienteering sim Virtual-O. Map Map is similarly about orienting yourself in a world using landmaps, but here you do so to make the map itself, with a much more playful presentation.

A man cuddles a baby, in a children's bedroom, while another kid crawls on their bed and a third is cuddled by a woman. — Brendan, yesterday.

Paralives

I confess, when Paralives was first shown over five years ago, I figured it was a game that would either never come out or would be bad when it did. A wildly ambitious indie Sims? Sure, it already had a cool character creator, but the rest of the game would surely fall down just as every

28 May 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

One of the best arcade racers is about to disappear

Coast 2 Toast

I haven't read Brendan Keogh's book The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist, but I believe I can make a water tight counter-argument in my new book proposal, If The Videogame Industry Doesn't Exist, How Come I Hate It So Much?.

From June 1st, Horizon Chase Turbo, its predecessor and all DLC will be delisted from all storefronts, preventing people from buying one of the best arcade racers of the past decade.

We're used to racing games being delisted because they often contain licensed cars and those licenses expire. The Horizon games do not contain any licensed cars, however.

We're also sadly used to racing games becoming unplayable, because they were 'always online' in some nebulous way and their servers are switched off. Horizon Chase Turbo's only online component was leaderboards, however, which were already disabled back in 2023. What's happening now wouldn't fall afoul of the Stop Killing Games movement, because owners will still be able to play the game.

"Couch multiplayer is back." Aaaaand it's gone again.

In short, Horizon Chase Turbo remaining available to purchase via digital storefronts wouldn't cost its developers anything.

The announcement that the

25 May 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

Tinkering with games is as good as playing them

Computer is my hobby

Our first home computer was an Amstrad CPC 464. My Dad bought it and used it for, among other things, building a database of all the films he had recorded on VHS tapes. He's a Western buff and he'd spend weekends pecking in details of which tape had which film, and since multiple tapes had multiple films, how far you had to fast forward to find the one you wanted. I didn't understand this at the time, as I was only a few years old. My brothers and I used the Amstrad for playing games - or for trying, anyway, and then for learning patience when the cassette tape failed to load for the third time. Why would you want to spend your time with the computer updating a database when you could be playing games?

Now I know better. Now I know that videogames are just one avenue through which you can tinker with the computer.

In retrospect, my tinkering started early, when I realised that drawing Worms levels in DeluxePaint on the Amiga and then importing the bitmaps in-game was more fun than playing Worms itself. When we got a PC in the mid-90s,

24 May 2026 By Graham Smith Feature

The Lie-In

Links to games writing from the past week

Good morning, videogames. A heatwave has struck the UK this weekend, a country where all the buildings are designed to retain heat. Unfortunately I must remain indoors, because my skin is designed the same way. Let's take a sweaty, sunburnt look at some writing about videogames from across the week.

Over at Remap Radio, Dia Lacina took on the unenviable task of reviewing ZA/UM's new game, Zero Parades: For Dead Spies.

We learn in the opening minutes of Zero Parades that CASCADE is the only agent to return from a job gone bad, and now she's warehoused in a filing cabinet-gulag for failed spies called "The Freezer." This is where you stew in self-accusatory depression, spending your days drowning under paperwork while you hold trauma's finger and point it right at yourself. This is spy hell.

The scandal-soaked rat kings over at the Jank spiritual predecessor didn't manage a full review of Zero Parades (unlike us), but Edwin Evans-Thirlwell did deign to bring his takes-one-to-know-one expertise to explaining why ZA/UM's latest is "both bootleg Disco Elysium and a spirited interrogation of fake culture in